The Issue of Credibility
David Brock and Julie Hiatt Steele
by Tamara Baker

March 22, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- If you've been following the commotion surrounding David Brock's new book, Blinded by the Right (a book that I believe will be the first he's ever written to become a best-seller without the assistance of a massive right-wing-run bulk-sales campaign), you'll have heard over and over again the following mantra:

"He's admitted to being a liar then; so how do we know he's not a liar now?"

Thus doth the GOPMedia try to discourage honest examination of Brock's magnum opus.

In this week's New York Observer, Joe Conason takes this attack head-on and replies thus:

I first met David Brock in the fall of 1997, when I was trying to learn about the [American] Spectator's Arkansas Project, a strange scheme first mentioned by media reporter Howard Kurtz in a story about the abrupt firing of the magazine's publisher. Several weeks earlier, Mr. Brock had publicly broken with the Spectator's style of Clinton-bashing in an essay for Esquire called "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man." (In that same essay, Mr. Brock had taken a shot at me for an admittedly nasty column I had written about him and former F.B.I. agent Gary Aldrich.)

[...]

During the months that followed, I was able to confirm everything Mr. Brock told me (and much more) about the Spectator, the Arkansas Project, the "elves" behind the Paula Jones case, Richard Mellon Scaife and the other secret financiers of the campaign against the Clintons. I found independent sources who provided documentation of the Arkansas Project's personnel and expenditures. Eventually, The Observer and other news organizations -- including The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Post and Salon -- proved his veracity about key figures and events. Whatever his motives, the repentant "hit man" was telling the truth. While a few of his assertions have been disputed, none has been disproved.

By journalistic standards, then, Mr. Brock is a credible person; more credible, certainly, than those who tried to deny the existence of the Arkansas Project and, more broadly, the "right-wing conspiracy" to undermine the Clinton Presidency.

As the Doc would say, 'nuff said.

But you know, David Brock isn't the first person against whom that "how can you believe an admitted liar" argument's been used.

I first encountered it back in 1998, the very same sentences uttered, in many cases, by the very same people uttering them now -- except, in 1998, they were uttered about Julie Hiatt Steele.

In 1997, Julie Hiatt Steele was asked by Kathleen Willey to tell Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that she backed a claim of Willey's that Willey had told Julie (I'm sorry, I can't call her "Ms. Steele -- I know the lady) about an alleged groping that Ms. Willey claimed she suffered at the hands of Bill Clinton. A heavily-pressured Julie, wanting to help a friend, even a not-all-that-close one like Willey, reluctantly agreed to do so -- but only if Isikoff didn't put Julie's name in print stating this.

Unfortunately, Isikoff did. And a horrified, mortified Julie immediately stepped forward to set the record straight.

If she had stayed silent, if she had let the in-print falsehood stand, she herself would still be at her high-paying job. She would still have her beautiful home in the suburbs of Richmond. She would still have a retirement nest egg and money in the bank.

But she didn't. She, like David Brock does now, wanted to undo untruths that she had a part in creating. (Click here for Salon's very good overview of her case.)

And, like David Brock, it was because she wanted to set the record straight that the forces of the far right suddenly brought all their firepower to bear against her.

The parallels don't stop there. Like David Brock, Julie Hiatt Steele has been accused by the right wing of "defending the Clintons for money". Like David Brock, Julie Hiatt Steele's finances have in fact taken a turn for the worse, not the better, since she became tagged as a "Clinton defender".  Brock went from having a $200,000-a-year job at the American Spectator, and the knowledge that so long as he wrote what the right wing wanted to see him write, they would guarantee his having "best sellers", to writing a handful of articles as a freelancer. Julie Hiatt Steele went from having a very good job to having no job at all.

David Brock's newest and best book will help him keep the wolf from the door.  But Julie needs some help to keep the wolf from hers.

Go visit Bartcop.com, click on the Julie links, and you'll see what I mean.